Sweden calling!

Name is Ewa and residence is the very south of Sweden. Always loved hot food and have classmates from high school that will tell you I make the meanest chili this side of the Atlantic!

Didn’t really get into it for real though until 1999 or so when I started growing my own chile plants with seeds I took from a store bought Habanero & Jalapenos. Needless to say I got bitten and started surfing the internet for more info/people with fellow interest and found, what I believe to be Sweden’s largest Chile head - http://petterssononline.com/habanero/index.php - Mats had the courtesy to not only provide me with seeds but also with great tips on how to grow them. I was hooked! Every spring I tell myself I’m going to limit myself to only 10 different kinds of chilies and every summer I end up having at least 25! My absolute favorite is Brown Congo, but I also enjoy the subtle tastes in chipotle.

Since we grow so many chiles on our own we’ve had to find ways of using it. Just harvesting them and putting them in the freezer and then use those in stews etc didn’t seem quite right. Since hubby is a chef and I used to be one, inventing new recipes is not an issue in this house. Only problem is, most of our friends can’t handle the heat as well as we can. Some of the thing’s we make is Habanero truffles, strawberry/habanero jam & raw spiced salmon, were we use chipotle, lemon leaves and sun dried tomatoes as a paste for flavor.

Apart from growing chilies and making good use of them, we try to travel as much as possible and last trip went to Argentina/Chile were we continued our hunt for seeds. Found some fine examples of Manzano and an indefinable plant that was sold in a store that dealt in cat and dog food! Latest hunt for seeds went in a totally different direction – Read about the Naga Morich in here and went hunting on E-bay! Got the seeds and some fruit samples but it was too late in the year to plant them so that is this year’s mission.

There are 2 passions in our lives – Chiles and dogs. We got 2 Boerboels that will keep us on our feet most time, and when it’s not the girls keeping us busy it’s keeping Chili’s homepage up to date or arranging bb-meetings with our bb-friends over here. At these gatherings my chili (the stew) has become the standard food one of the meals so I’m doing my best at preaching the chile word for the Scandinavians!

My thoughts regarding writing in here are that I will try and give the readers a view on what’s the chile situation like in other places of the world. The interest in chilies has started to grow in Sweden, you now can buy a small variety of fresh and dried chilies in the supermarket and you can get a few hot sauces in the store, you won’t be able to get anything else than Tabasco and Sambal Oelek in most restaurants. So I will recon and go out and have a look at what’s available and then try to give you an angle on what’s happening and if it’s any good! I will probably also write quite a bit about cooking with chilies. And nag a bit about Chili (the dog) stealing anything and everything with chile in it!

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